Video games have become a common source of entertainment for virtually every segment of the population. The video game industry has seen considerable evolution, from the introduction of stand-alone arcade games, to home-based computer games and the emergence of games made for specialized consoles.
Meanwhile content, such as video games, in which provided screens are rendered by an apparatus, is not limited to specialized consoles and can be provided for general information processing apparatuses such as PCs and smartphones as well. In recent years, many common information processing apparatus including game consoles have a connectivity functions for connecting to a network such as the Internet, and the aforementioned contents have the ability to provide services and entertainment using network communication. For example, one kind of service that uses network communication is a massively multiplayer type network game such as an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), for example.
Also, in recent years, provision system exist in which rather than performing execution of screen rendering on a user apparatus, screens are rendered on a connected external apparatus such as a server. In such as case, a similar provision experience to a case where the user apparatus renders the screens can be realized by the user apparatus receiving and displaying data of screens rendered by the external apparatus. So-called cloud-based rendering systems, in which screen provision by such kinds of external apparatuses is performed via a network such as the Internet to which many users can simultaneously connect, having been getting attention in recent years. There exist cloud-based gaming systems that use such systems in the video game industry as well.
In a cloud-based gaming system, a player can utilize an ordinary Internet-enabled device such as a smartphone or tablet to connect to a video game server on the Internet. The video game server starts a session for the player and renders images for the player based on selections (e.g., moves, actions) made by the player and other attributes of the game. The images are delivered to the player's device over the Internet, and are reproduced on the display. In this way, players from anywhere in the world can play a video game without the use of specialized video game consoles, software or graphics processing hardware.